What connects a turn-of-the-millennium documentary called Being Caprice, a 1972 appearance by Peter Sellers on Parkinson and German crime series Aktenzeichen XY … ungelöst, otherwise known as the basis for Crimewatch? They all serve as key ingredients in 21st-century television hits, that’s what. Here, we dissect some of the most successful shows of recent years to see what they’re made of – and trace their constituent parts back through nearly 100 years of television history.

Peep Show

One of the most beloved sitcoms of the millennium, much of Peep Show’s appeal lies in its sense of intimacy. One key component of Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong’s recently retired series is the POV camera angles, inspired by 2000 documentary Being Caprice (itself based on 1999’s Being John Malkovich), which enabled viewers to live vicariously through cameras attached to the model. The show formed part of Channel 4’s Alt-TV season, in which the broadcaster tried to imagine how television might look in the future, but, as the Guardian’s Jaques Peretti noted at the time, it bore a striking resemblance to a spoof segment in The Day Today called CamFam, which saw a family agree to have “cameras implanted into their faces” in order to facilitate a new kind of observational documentary.

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Another Peep Show signature, Mark and Jez’s interior monologue voiceovers, was adapted from Annie Hall’s candid subtitles. While embarrassment may be a cornerstone of all sitcoms, the semblance of reality these techniques provide make Peep Show a “cringe comedy”, a genre popularised by The Office via talkshow pastiche The Larry Sanders Show, with the idea of highly naturalistic dramatic irony-based humiliation traceable to This Is Spinal Tap. Finally, the spectre of Seinfeld looms large. Not only did the creators emulate its intricate, climactic plotting, but they have also said Mark was informed by pedant extraordinaire George Costanza.

The Trip

Based on Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy meta-adaptation A Cock And Bull Story, this brilliantly ambitious comedy also sees Coogan and Brydon play their fictional selves – a premise found in the earliest sitcoms, among them The George Burns And Gracie Allen Show, I Love Lucy and Hancock’s Half Hour, and one freed from the studio by Curb Your Enthusiasm. Like The Trip, much of the latter is improvised, a technique notably utilised for heightened naturalism by Mike Leigh teleplays such as Nuts In May.

The conceit that Coogan is on a restaurant tour for the Observer means the show serves as a food travelogue, an idea pioneered by Keith Floyd’s 1984 series Floyd On Fish. The final facet is the pair’s impersonations. Mike Yarwood is cited as the UK’s first big-name impressionist, but Peter Sellers was mimicking celebrities on the BBC in 1948, plus he popularised the Michael Caine impression (a cornerstone of The Trip) during a 1972 Parkinson appearance.

Gogglebox

Debuting in 2013, this entertaining factual format was envisaged as a cross between The Royle Family (fittingly, the sitcom’s creators Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne narrate the series) and Harry Hill’s TV Burp. Although Gogglebox bears closer relation to Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe in its guise as a comic analysis of the week’s television, the central conceit of the earlier TV Burp has few predecessors – although one relative is US series Talk Soup, later rebranded The Soup, a 1990s clip show that drolly surveyed the previous day’s chatshows – while the idea of the public as TV critic can be traced back to the 1961 dawn of Points Of View.

Gogglebox is a highly evolved reality format but still bears a striking resemblance to what is widely cited as the genre’s originator, 1973’s An American Family (remade by the BBC as The Family the following year), and also owes a debt to fixed-rig shows such as Big Brother, where no crew are present allowing for more candour and naturalism.

The Great British Bake Off

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The most-watched show in the UK, Bake Off has its roots in the first competitive cookery show, 1990’s MasterChef, dreamed up by Quadrophenia and, coincidentally, The Family director Franc Roddam, who wanted to “democratise” food. TV chefs (like hosts Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry) are almost as old as the medium itself, with Marcel Boulestin the earliest (thanks to his 1937 BBC cookery demonstration Cook’s Night Out) and Philip Harben the first celebrity incarnation (the BBC began broadcasting properly in 1936).

As recently noted by Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian, the idea of an elimination-based contest has its genesis in an item on youth TV show Network 7 in 1988. That laid the groundwork for desert island gameshow Survivor, which first made it to TV in Sweden in 1997 as Expedition Robinson. The icing on the cake, as it were, comes from presenters Mel and Sue’s constant innuendo, a British tradition most rigorously immortalised on film by the Carry On franchise.

Happy Valley

Sally Wainwright’s captivating drama was conceived as Juliet Bravo meets Fargo, the former, a 1980s BBC police drama, providing the female police inspector-led serial template, the latter the dark kidnapping plot. The show’s brutality is particularly notable, an appetite for which was arguably created by The Sopranos and the bleak drama that blossomed in its wake.

Making A Murderer

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This true-crime hit belongs to a genre of documentaries focusing on miscarriages of justice, notably Errol Morris’s groundbreaking doc The Thin Blue Line to the Paradise Lost trilogy of films concerning the wrongful convictions of the West Memphis Three. That trend can be traced back to 1950s US series The Court Of Last Resort, in which dubious cases were re-enacted for TV. What makes Making A Murderer such a moreish prospect is its episodic telling, a technique that its creators Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos say was inspired by the 2004 French docu-series The Staircase, and later taken up by the Serial podcast and HBO’s The Jinx.

A legacy of Making A Murderer, for good or ill, has been the way in which it allows the masses to get involved with criminal investigations, with Reddit sleuths taking on the case and petitions sent to the White House calling for the release of Steven Avery, the man at the centre of the series. Precedents for this sort of involvement can be seen in call-in shows such as America’s Most Wanted, a series based on our own Crimewatch, itself inspired by the German series Aktenzeichen XY … ungelöst (Case number XY … Unsolved). Finally there’s the show’s stylish credits, which, with its images of ruined landscapes, owe a debt to True Detective.

Empire

Sudsy, melodramatic and highly watchable, Lee Daniels’s hip-hop drama fits into the US TV tradition of the night-time soap, following in the stilettoed footsteps of Dallas, Dynasty and the genre’s originator Peyton Place. Indeed, Daniels has said that he wanted to create a “Black Dynasty” with Empire, and based the drama’s fearsome matriarch Cookie on Joan Collins’s Dynasty character Alexis Carrington (though in Cookie’s darker moments you may detect hints of the monstrous Mary Lee Johnston from Daniels’s Oscar-nominated Precious – Mo’nique, who played Johnston, claims she was offered the role of Cookie).

Empire’s central storyline, about a father deciding which child will take his crown, is cribbed from the inheritance sagas of King Lear and 60s period epic The Lion In Winter. (The family’s surname, Lyon, is a hat tip to the latter). Meanwhile, in the show’s original hip-hop numbers, written by Timbaland and released as actual charting singles, there are hints of a musical TV drama tradition from Glee and Nashville right back to Fame (the TV series).